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The Authomatic Translator: SYSTRAN. January 22, 2007

Firstly, it is important to define what the authomatic translator is, and then put an example to understand everything better.

The authomatic translator:

The authomatic translator is one of the fastest ways of translating, because what you only have to do, is introduce the word or the text you want. The translator only has to translate what he receives. But, after observing this small fragment, we realize that the authomatic translator can has it´s disadvantages. What this system does, is to translate everything literally. And, usually, if you want to translate something from English to Spanish, you can´t do it literally. So, sometimes this system can help us, but others, it translates the words without any sense.

Systran is an automatic translation system that was created by Peter Toma in 1970. First of all, Toma developed in the Georgetown University a system, that he continued developing during years until he created the final Systran. He was also the chosen to translate it from English to Russian for the American Army. Later, the NASA proved the system in one of its projects, and although it did not give good results, this experience gave more importance to Systran. After becoming famous, the EC asked to Peter Toma for a demonstration translating something from English to French. After that demonstration, the EC was satisfied. In 1976, Systran was bought by the Comission and developed later. It was the bureaucrat Loll Rolling who introduced the authomatic translation in the European Comission because he obtained the license for using Systran. Consequently, the system dictionaries are full of terminologies about the Comunity. Now, the CE system has 17 pairs of languages which have been added in a linguistic services local net. Nowadays, translations are processed at a speed of 500,000 words per hour.In 1994, Systran is offered free in the Compuserve chats, and a year later a new version for Windows was created.

But the Systran great success was in 1997, when after signing an agreement with Internet Alta Vista, the translation service BABELFISH was offered free. Nowadays, Systran is the most developed translation system (with 35 pairs of available languages) and the most used (1,000,000 translations).